"North Dakota and South Dakota don't really need to be separate states."
"And if we want to keep the fifty states, then we can unify the Dakotas and split California, Northern California and Southern California."
"But what would we call the new states?"
"Northern California and Southern California."
"That's too boring." "Well, how about.....Siliconia...and...Siliconia."

Wow, I'm surrounded by good and tender and caring friends. This has been a very, very good weekend. I love feeling loved and wanted! And I've had so much intoxicating intimacy these past few days. What a wonderful feeling.

"Lawrence Lessig was a pimp, gambler, and racketeer who loved his wife and knew when to draw the line."
"The EFF was in many ways as good as it was bad....it lived a life that included just about anything you can think of that could happen to a 401(c)."

Wow, I still haven't completely cleaned up from the last party and I'm having another one tomorrow night! Yikes! Oh, but wow, I only have one class tomorrow. Yay! Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays will be full up this semester, but Tuesdays and Thursdays maybe I can get some work done. Maybe?

I need to wash my sheets, and my pillowcases, and other laundry, and sell this bureau set, and agh. Food preparation, cleaning, decluttering, moving more stuff to my new place, packing stuff to go to Stockton this weekend, and so on.

Oh yes! Yesterday I went to the flea market (Sundays at the Ashby BART station parking lot) with my sister. Terrific! I obtained an audiocassette of Electric Light Orchestra songs, a videotape that purports to showcase some Garrison Keillor, and the Stanislaw Lem book A Perfect Vacuum (reviews of nonexistent books). You should go, too, if you can. Great bargains.

You may recall that Leonard once said that Seth has the perfect book collection, because nearly every book in it Leonard would like to read and own. Well, a bookseller at the flea market : me :: Seth : Leonard. I wanted vast proportions of his wares. Lem! Rushdie! Vonnegut! Lawrence (D.H.)! Wodehouse! Cleary! Lahiri! Oh, David Wexler, you siren!

Yesterday I also spent a few minutes at the three-hour memorial service that the university held for Professor Michael Rogin. I was gratified when I saw that hundreds of people had assembled to remember the man's life. How strange it is that I can picture him so clearly and yet he will never be alive again and that picture will never again become fact. And my memories will decay and I will die and in a few hundred years no one will remember him as he was, not one person will remember him answering her question or giving her advice.

He was important to me.

The past tense is such a monstrous thing.